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My fourteen year old son’s asking if I can meet anybody in the world, who I would meet. And the choices I always give him are very disappointing because they’re mostly artists whose minds I find very interesting. Tom ______ I would love to sit and talk to. But the fact is that if I meet somebody that I greatly admire – even though I myself am a person of some stature – I’m sort of tongue-tied. They’re tongue-tied. And meetings need to happen naturally. I mean for example, my favorite . . . one of my favorite musicians is Aimee Mann. You know I went to an Aimee Mann concert, went backstage, talked to her for a while. Fascinating. Great gal. But you know what is it? I’m some stranger that, you know, she’s invited into her . . . into her backstage. And the conversation we had was somewhat forced. And the people that I would most like to meet are my dearest friends whom I see to seldom, and with whom when I get together I have wonderful, deep, joyful conversations, or exuberant arguments. And if, in the course of my life I can add to my friends; or I can meet, you know a few great artists with whom I develop . . . or with whom we develop mutual friendship, I can’t imagine anything more pleasurable, more enriching in life. The people I most definitely don’t wanna meet are the high and the mighty. You know I salute them from my . . . from the depths of my Bohemian being. Let them go on about their life. But I think it’s a very dangerous thing for an artist to try to cultivate wealth to cultivate power. If it happens naturally, that’s wonderful. But you know you should always meet people in a democracy as equals. You respect them, they respect you. And I don’t want to live in a _______ society where people are ______ favor for their own advantage. I think that’s dangerous.

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What I love about the Aspen Conference is that it’s one of the few places in America where people who have excelled in totally different walks of life meet each other in a very unforced atmosphere and actually converse. We live in a society which is so specialized, most people don’t know very much except in their little occupations. And yet what we need to know is so broad – the amount of knowledge and experience in the world is so vast – that we need occasions like Aspen to in a sense enlarge our sense of the world.

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Well America is . . . has a wonderfully rich, artistic legacy. It’s predominantly European, even though it’s unfashionable to say that. But it’s a mix of European cultures that doesn’t happen in Europe. And then by the time they got to the West Coast they were suddenly being hit with Native American, with Asian, with Latin American and Oceanic traditions too. And so the American arts are, in a funny way, a meeting place of world culture to which a kind of a European DNA . . . everything else has been grafted. Perfect example of this is jazz, which takes this four square, European kind of music and then begins to syncopate it to African poly-rhythms. And you know this . . . You know if you look at the way the African arts – largely as they came through the Caribbean and American slave culture – completely transformed what the American European arts are. You know I think what we are here is a meeting place – a kind of laboratory – of human existence.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

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Well a measure of a good life, I think, is to . . . to live truthfully to your own principles; to . . . to do work; to be kind; to be generous; to have responsibility to the people you love and who love you. And that’s a very simple, you know, measure. Of course you can create, you know, marvelous inventions, gather vast wealth. That strikes me as very secondary. My sense of a good life is . . . is in a very domestic, human sense. And I think people need to take their life seriously. You know you only get one . . . one time around the block. And you . . . What you want to come out of that is a sense that you’ve lived your life well.

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I was raised very Catholic. I’m still Catholic. And I was raised with the lives of the saints. Every day we would like at the life of a great man or a woman who had somehow, you know, led a good life. And I still . . . And what inspires me still are the people. I mean I meet somebody who has spent 10 years in Africa working in a hospital, and that sh . . . reminds me of, “Well I’ve gotta lead a better life. I’ve got to work harder.” And so I think it’s, you know, we learn from one another.

“There is no such thing as the state. And no one exists alone. Hunger allows no choice

to the citizen or the police. You must love one another or die.”

And the notion that no one exists alone; that we’re part of the human race; that we have

these moral, spiritual, ethical obligations to each other; and that we learn from each other. And

so what inspires me . . . what inspires me are people who are better than me. And most people

I was raised very Catholic and I still look at things as a Catholic. Which is to say that I have a sense of the complexity and richness of life . . . that there is, in a sense, both the visible world and an invisible world; that the actions that we take have consequences beyond our lives; that we should be morally responsible for our lives. Another thing that Catholicism teaches you is, I think, patience and humility; that we . . . that we are not better than other people. That we have a responsibility to help other people. And the greatest gift of Catholicism, I think, is an openness to grace. That is to have a sense that there are times in your life where a grace that comes from beyond your own life actually pours into your life. It helps you. And so . . . so I think, you know. . . I’m . . . I’m very much of a . . . of a Mediterranean Catholic in that sense.

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I was raised very Catholic. I’m still Catholic. And I was raised with the lives of the saints. Every day we would like at the life of a great man or a woman who had somehow, you know, led a good life. And I still . . . And what inspires me still are the people. I mean I meet somebody who has spent 10 years in Africa working in a hospital, and that sh . . . reminds me of, “Well I’ve gotta lead a better life. I’ve got to work harder.” And so I think it’s, you know, we learn from one another.

A wonderful line by . . . by _________ that’s the . . . one of the . . . it’s the climactic stanza of his very famous poem “September 1, 1939”. And it goes something like, “All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man on the street; then the lie of authority whose buildings grope the sky.”

And this is the line that I’m going to:

“There is no such thing as the state. And no one exists alone. Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police. You must love one another or die.

I was raised very Catholic and I still look at things as a Catholic. Which is to say that I have a sense of the complexity and richness of life . . . that there is, in a sense, both the visible world and an invisible world; that the actions that we take have consequences beyond our lives; that we should be morally responsible for our lives. Another thing that Catholicism teaches you is, I think, patience and humility; that we . . . that we are not better than other people. That we have a responsibility to help other people. And the greatest gift of Catholicism, I think, is an openness to grace. That is to have a sense that there are times in your life where a grace that comes from beyond your own life actually pours into your life. It helps you. And so . . . so I think, you know. . . I’m . . . I’m very much of a . . . of a Mediterranean Catholic in that sense.

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The only force in our society that’s strong enough to in any sense compete with the mass of electronic media is the educational system. And I see the American educational system in really rather dire straits. And talking about the arts, the arts have been systematically removed from most of our schools. And so unless you grow up in an affluent community, you’re most . . . not likely to have the arts in your education. Which means not only are we not developing an audience for the arts – that’s one thing – but more important, the new generation of Americans are not receiving those spurs to personal growth that the arts create. The purpose of arts education is not to create more artists. It’s not to create more audiences. The purpose of arts education is to create a complete human being who can lead a productive life in a free society. You can’t do that just through academics and athletics. There are certain things that you can only learn in stories, in songs, that you can only see in images. When you take this out of a kid’s education, you impoverish their possibilities, both individually and socially. It’s as important to educate a child’s or an adolescent’s emotions as it is their mind. And when you take this out of the education of 60,000,000 American kids, and you focus on developing low-level work skills, I think you have, in the offing, a cultural, educational, economic and political disaster.

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There are so many problems facing the arts today that it’s hard to give just one. Let me pick two.

The first is the fact that we live in a world of non-stop, commercial, mass, electronic entertainment; hundreds of TV stations; millions of Internet sites; hundreds of thousands of films and video games. And you can actually sort of be connected to an electronic device from the moment you get up ‘til the moment you . . . you fall asleep. And I think it has the tendency – and this is something . . . I’m saying this as somebody who likes to watch television, likes to go to the movies, likes all of these things – that if left unchecked, unbalanced in life, it breeds a kind of . . . of semi-comatose relationship to reality. You’re always being lulled into kind of a vague sense of comfort. And even if you sit at one side and make cynical comments at your television, you’re still watching it. And I think that it’s hard, in a world like that, for someone to achieve the interiority of existence . . . to develop an inner-life of sufficient death, of sufficient strength, and to understand your destiny.

The second thing is that the only force in our society that’s strong enough to in any sense compete with the mass of electronic media is the educational system. And I see the American educational system in really rather dire straits. And talking about the arts, the arts have been systematically removed from most of our schools. And so unless you grow up in an affluent community, you’re most . . . not likely to have the arts in your education. Which means not only are we not developing an audience for the arts – that’s one thing – but more important, the new generation of Americans are not receiving those spurs to personal growth that the arts create. The purpose of arts education is not to create more artists. It’s not to create more audiences. The purpose of arts education is to create a complete human being who can lead a productive life in a free society. You can’t do that just through academics and athletics. There are certain things that you can only learn in stories, in songs, that you can only see in images. When you take this out of a kid’s education, you impoverish their possibilities, both individually and socially. It’s as important to educate a child’s or an adolescent’s emotions as it is their mind. And when you take this out of the education of 60,000,000 American kids, and you focus on developing low-level work skills, I think you have, in the offing, a cultural, educational, economic and political disaster.

The way one gets greater respect for the arts is not through intellectual argumentation. It’s through experience. To have sat in a concert hall and have been moved to the deepest center of your humanity; to go to a museum and be simply ravished by what you see; to go walk down a street in a city with great architecture and see how powerfully design and architecture mold human behavior for the better. Those are the kinds of experiences that I think are transformational. The trouble is if kids don’t get them growing up, it’s increasingly unlikely that they’ll look for them as adults. If we create kids who are essentially lulled into a kind of comfortable, stress-free existence by being mildly entertained all the time, I don’t think that we’re going to have the . . . you know, the heroes, the saints, the reformers that our society needs. Nor will we have the decent, everyday people our society needs.

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I’m the Chairman of the official arts agency of the United States government. When I first came to the job five years ago, it was not an easy job. In fact the previous chairman – a wonderful man named Michael Hammond – died after seven days. I mean it was a job of enormous pressure. The agency was endangered. The staff was embattled, demoralized. And it was an enormous task that most people thought was insolvable. . I have indeed solved it. But what I tried to do was something very simple, which was to ignore all expert advice and to go back to what the agency was begun as during the “Great Society” program as a vision of what America might draw from the arts. And I tried to ignore all of the controversies that had really paralyzed the agency for the better part of . . . of two decades and focus it on something quite simple: to bring the best art possible to the broadest audience possible; to create large public partnerships where we could essentially enrich and, I hope, transform the lives of millions of Americans. We did this without adequate budget, without adequate staff, resources or skills. But we did it . . . And I think maybe I’m idealistic. Maybe I’m a pathetic, Jimmy Stewart type in believing this. We did it out of idealism, and I think that there’s not enough idealism in Washington right now. And lots of people came to our aid.

The struggle in my professional life as Arts Endowment Chair is to take the programs we have and bring them to more people than we can afford. Which is to, in a sense, to create partnerships, to create resources, to break through barriers. And how do we bring arts into the military? How do we bring them into Native American communities, and to inner cities and to prisons when there aren’t the avenues to do that easily? And so . . . but it’s a joyful struggle, I think. I think that when you have something good that you’re bringing to people, you know, it fills you with a kind of pleasure.

Recorded on: 7/6/2007

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Well there’s different works with different impacts. I mean what I hope is that I will write a few poems that lodge in people’s memory. That is the highest aspiration of a poet. Some of the prose I’ve written, some of the essays I’ve written, I know in a sense it changed at least American and some European countries’ sense of what the role of literature is . . . the role of poetry is in society. But you know prose, I think – especially critical prose, non-fiction prose – is by its nature almost always ________. You know you change the conversation for a moment if the essay is still read 10, 15 years later. And I’ve been lucky to have essays that are still read 10, 15 years later. I mean that’s the most you can hope for.

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Well poetry is humanity’s answer to mortality. I mean if you had to talk about what poetry is about – what all poetry is about – it’s about time and mortality; that we live these finite existences through the world. Because the world, every year, renews itself in spring. And we see this kind of cyclical aspect of natural life. And yet our own lives are linear and finite. And it makes, in a sense, something enormously precious. If we were gods, if we were eternal, we would not need poetry. We would not need the arts. We would have existence unchallenged, unlimited. But because we’re mortal – because we face death – we have to in a sense constantly stop and understand our lives in different ways.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

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“So much of what we live goes on inside. The diaries of grief. The tongue-tied aches of unacknowledged love are no less real for having passed unsaid. What we conceal is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write __________.”

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The rain was like a waterfall of brilliant ________. Cool and silent as the stars. The storm hid from the night. To my surprise, you took my arm. A gesture you didn’t explain. And we spoke in whispers, as if we too might imitate the rain.

Then suddenly the storm receded as quickly as it came. The doors behind us opened up. The hostess called your name.

I watched you merge into the crowd, aloof and yet alive. We didn’t speak another word except to say goodnight.

Why does that evening’s memory return with this night’s storm? A party 20 years ago, its disappointments warm. There are so many might have beens. What ifs that won’t stay buried. Other cities. Other jobs. Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining for places it never went, as if life might be happier just by being different.”

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Well I think in some ways, young artists today are finding their inspiration as much in pop culture – in those little areas in pop culture where people are still doing serious work. And the reason is because that’s the only culture that’s accessible to them. They have some people like . . . Especially with musicians where there’s still a . . . a viable, kind of classical tradition. They can be part of an orchestra. They can learn the repertoire, things like this. But young artists, I think, learn from the art that came before them and the circumstances of their own lives. And so I think it’s always been the case. But I think today, a lot of artists are more in the present moment than they are with any kind of vivifying relationship with the past. And you can do good things out of that, but I think it’s actually a richer way to be able to pull the present and the past together.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

Literature:

Well you know, I think that literature is one of the necessary human studies, because the beginning of human wisdom is to recognize that, you know, we are the product of history. That millions, billions of people have lived before us. They led lives that are startlingly similar to ours even though they were in different places and different times. And what literature allows you to do is to create a conversation with the past and the present out of what you can imagine and create a future. And so it gives you a sense of the reality of other people’s lives from the inside – from the “dailyness” of their existence – not only in the peak moments, but in their ordinary moments. And what that, I think, does is build compassion. It builds humanity. And it builds a sense . . . and the sense of what the changeable parts of human nature are and what the permanent parts are.

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Recorded On: 7/6/07

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I’m from Hawthorne, California originally. I live in both California and Washington, D.C.

at the moment.

See I’m of the belief that your origins shape you in ways that you can never really entirely

shake off. And I am a working class, Latin kid from L.A. I was raised in a very

rough neighborhood – Hawthorne – which a lot of people would know from being the setting

of “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown”. It’s an urban, harsh neighborhood in Southwest

Los Angeles. My father was Sicilian. My mother was Mexican. I was raised largely in

a neighborhood of immigrants. And so I was raised in a very Catholic, working-class way.

And that’s shaped pretty much most of my attitude since then.